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Dear Madame Speaker Pelosi,I very much appreciate your stance to require a public option in the pending health care legislation. There appear to be no remedies in the legislation for rising medical costs. Should Republicans regain the White House and Senate in eight to twelve years, the current legislation may very well be scraped as a "failure" as it will not lower costs. Only a public option, a government paid health care plan, can lower costs.
It would not be fair, however, for the five in six Americans who have been paying for private medical insurance their entire lives to simply give that capital away to private health insurance companies. Beginning a universal single payer plan by seizing those assets through eminent domain would cause too large a propaganda furor to work.
A less drastic, public- and media-friendly option would be to pick some age, 18, 21 or 25, and put everyone at that age or younger under a single payer umbrella. By doing so we could phase out private health insurance over the next 40 years. It would not be such a shock to the economy and it would allow the government plan to grow at a steady rate as well. Such a system should allow others to buy in as well.
The only organization strong enough to stand up to the private medical industry over costs is the government. No consumer advocacy group or coalition has the power or else we would have seen medical costs stabilize over the past two decades. They have not.
Thank-you for your continued commitment to single payer health care and other policies for the mutual benefit of all American's.
Sincerely,
Scott Tyner
Hattiesburg, MS
